Year: 2011

As a former student protestor against the Viet Nam War and for civil rights, I sympathize with and applaud the Occupy Wall Street protestors in lower Manhattan and elsewhere across the country.  As an ardent admirer of Mahatma Gandhi and his disciple Martin Luther King, I believe that widespread peaceful disobedience can help change the direction of a country.

Having said that, after reviewing the news stories about the protests and read the Occupy Wall Street website, I’m shocked that the protestors and organizers really don’t have a plan and have not articulated specific actions that we as a society should take to rebalance the distribution of wealth and income, which over the past 30 years has gotten severely out of whack.  Law and policy have redistributed wealth over the past 30 years, leaving the richest Americans with a much larger percentage of both wealth and income going to the top 1% and 5% of the country, and much less going to everyone else.  And it is law and policy that will have to redistribute wealth again so that we achieve the more equitable society that we enjoyed throughout the 50’s, 60’s and most of the 70’s of the last century.

In OpEdge, I have written many times about specific actions that we should take to create a more equitable distribution of wealth and income, but here’s a quick list of some of the major actions we could take:

• Raise the minimum wage
• Raise income taxes on the highest incomes and institute a wealth tax, such as they have in France.
• Rebalance our labor laws in favor of unions, which historically have raised working people into the middle class.
• End the capital gains tax discount or limit it to true investment in creating new jobs and wealth, instead of allowing people to get a tax break when they profit from a sale of stocks or bonds in which the money goes to someone other than the company creating the new jobs.
• Invest in national and state-wide programs to repair our broken public infrastructure of mass transit, public education, roads, bridges and sewer systems, which will create jobs and strengthen our public institutions.
• Only import goods from nations that pay the same wages that we do and have high worker safety standards.

There are other policy and law changes I could recommend, but I don’t want to dwell on these points, each of which can be argued and refined.  Instead I want to focus on the actions that we must take to make our elected officials implement the changes necessary to save our country.  I write “save our country,” because one of the lessons of world history is that countries in which the distribution of wealth becomes less equitable over time virtually always decline and those in which the distribution of wealth becomes more equitable virtually always flourish.

Our elected officials will for the most part ignore or downplay the significance of the protests and the protestors, just as they have ignored and continue to ignore the will of the American people on such issues as exiting Iraq, punishing Wall Street manipulators and raising taxes on the wealthy.  They ignore us and listen to the big banks and large corporations for one reason only: Money.  Politicians embrace the positions of big money and the mainstream news media directs its coverage primarily on the big money candidates.

But money is not votes.  While the media and politicians count money, election officials can only count votes. If we want to change the direction of the country, we need elected officials who will pass new laws and pursue new policies.

Here then are the steps I propose that we take to reclaim America:

1. Formulate a one-page set of specific actions that we will demand of any candidate that wants our support. I would think that this “Contract with the Real America” will include many of the actions I propose above, stated with more precision, e.g. “Impose an annual 2% tax on all net assets more than $1.0 million a year per taxable entity, and a 5% tax on all net assets of more than $10.0 million.” While my example uses one of my more radical proposals, I understand that the “Contract with the Real America” will have to be watered down a bit from my personal vision to resonate with the majority of Americans.
2. Identify local and national candidates (most likely Democrats or independents) who will back some, many or most of the actions proposed in the list.
3. Go to caucuses and support those candidates.
4. Volunteer for voter registration drives focused on those most likely to vote for progressives and left-leaning Democrats, e.g., students, the poor and minorities.
5. Engage in local “take people to the polls” campaigns on every election day (not just the presidential elections).
6. Vote in every election.

The other side has the money, but the rest of us have a very powerful tool in social media, a tool with which we can speak directly to people.  The organizers of Occupy Wall Street have used social media with some effectiveness to organize the protest. But with no plan of action, all the protests do is allow people to let off some steam.  Venting is fun, but at the end of the day it accomplishes nothing except to give people the illusion that they have acted.

When you say, “I think” or “I believe,” you haven’t really told a lie, since it’s what you “believe.”  So we can’t call Texas Governor Rick Perry a liar for having said over the weekend that he thinks that limiting carbon emissions would devastate the economy.  I suppose we’ll have to settle for calling him misinformed or stupid. 

Or perhaps we could connect his statements to the fact that he comes from a state dominated by oil and gas interests from whose financial troughs he has been feeding like a ravenous pig for years.  In that case, he’s a cynical politician who puts his own best interests above addressing a pressing threat to the entire world community.

Perry’s false claim that limiting carbon emissions will hurt the economy is one that many have bandied about for years, but just because you keep repeating something doesn’t make it so. 

To be sure, complying with stiffer pollution standards will cost money, but no one is going to burn that money or bury it in the ground.  It will be spent to create, buy and operate new technologies.  And that means jobs.  Other new jobs will be created for industry to manage and for government to oversee compliance.  FYI, I wrote “create” new technologies, but I want to point out that many of the technologies needed to  address the carbon-emissions challenge already exist; industry flacks tell us they’re too expensive, but isn’t that what the car companies said for years about seat belts and airbags? 

There is no doubt that the cost of many things will increase as the cost of producing electrical energy and running carbon-emitting industrial processes rises, just as the cost of phone service rose when phones were made Internet-capable and the cost of food rose when we began to institute safety and health standards more than 100 years ago.  Often, though, what happens when a new feature is added to existing goods and service is not a rise in the cost to the consumer, but a decrease in the profit made by the companies selling the goods and services.

At the end of the day, establishing new environmental regulations will lead to a transfer of wealth from the profits of oil companies, electrical utilities and heavy industry to pollution abatement companies and the people holding the many new jobs that will be created. To the degree that consumers will pay more, they will benefit from the new regulations, which will slow down global warming and enable everyone to breathe cleaner air.  Of course, cleaner air will lead to fewer lung ailments, which will hurt the medical industry.  The real threat to the economy then will be that with fewer people ill, our healthcare sector will shrink.  But is that such a bad thing? I don’t think so.

Of course, when I write, “Is that such a bad thing?” I am referring to society in general.  It will be a bad thing for Perry and the people who are backing him financially.

Before signing off, I want to consider one of the comments in Cowboy Rick’s most recent pronouncement on global warming that shows that there is some subtlety in this former C student: “Are we as a country willing to take this science as incontrovertible and put in place cap and trade legislation that will devastate this country economically?”

Cap and trade sets up a marketplace for pollution in which polluters buy “credits” from non-polluters instead of actually ending their own pollution.  For example, let’s say Company A has lowered its emissions.  Company B pays Company A for the right to consider the decrease in Company B’s pollution its own.  Multiply these transactions thousands of times and you have a new marketplace in which “credits” are bought and sold like stocks and bonds.  If it sounds confusing, complicated, inefficient and unnecessary, that’s because it is.  But it has the “advantage” of being a “market-based” solution in an area in which a market is not needed.  To my mind it would be far easier just to make the polluters spend the money to stop polluting. 

Perry’s either/or is not “either we continue to pollute or we regulate,” but “either we continue to pollute or we establish cap and trade.”  I suppose he figures that if we’re going to tackle global warming, we might as well at least uphold his cherished myth that markets always work and are always right.

America buys oil from Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.  We buy cars from Japan, South Korea and Europe.  And from China, we buy clothes, appliances, plastic goods, toys, shoes and medical equipment.

But for what goods and services are we the dominant world seller (that is, besides Spiderman movies and Lady Gaga)?

The answer is weapons.

According to a Congressional report released a few days ago, the United States dominates the world’s weapons market, selling almost 53% of the $40.4 billion in total world trade in arms in 2010.  In second place, with a mere 19.3% of world arms trade, was Russia.  And while the recession sent arms sales into a nose dive in 2010, going from $65.2 billion to $40.4 billion in the prior year, the U.S. percentage of total sales has been rising steadily. According to a Congressional report from a year ago, from 2006-2009, the United States had made only 38.6% of all agreements to sell weapons to other countries.  

And who is buying all of these bombs, guns, bullets, tanks and anti-aircraft systems? It turns out it’s the developing world, where governments tend to be less stable.  Of total arms sales last year, developing countries bought 76.2% of all implements of war, with the America supplying 48.6%—almost half—of all weapons of that total. 

Here’s the list of developing countries that bought the most bombs and bullets in 2010.  You tell me how many of these countries you want to have more weapons:

1. India
2. Taiwan
3. Saudi Arabia
4. Egypt
5. Israel
6. Algeria
7. Syria
8. South Korea
9. Singapore
10. Jordan

We’re perverting the words of the ancient prophet Isaiah.  Instead of turning swords into plowshares, we’re turning plowshares into swords, by arming to the teeth some of the most unstable countries or countries in some of the most unstable areas of the world. 

The weapons we sell are sophisticated, high-tech stuff that help countries perfect the art of mass killing: For example, The New York Times reported over the weekend that the Obama administration has supplied Israel with bombs capable of destroying buried targets.  My rhetorical question on this bit of news: will these bombs guide Israel towards a peaceful resolution with the Palestinians and a rapprochement with the Arab world, or will it embolden Israel to stoke the flames of Middle Eastern violence?

And even as the U.S. cash register for arms sales sounds a steady ka-ching ka-ching, we continue to develop more and more sophisticated arms like drone planes that turn war into a video game.  For a good overview of our drone program and other robotic weapons we are developing, check out Christian Caryl’s review of two books on the subject in the latest New York Review of Books.  This new generation of weapons makes it easier for aggressors to launch attacks that inflict maximum damage on the enemy and its innocent citizens with minimal damage to the soldiers of the attacking nation. 

One of our lesser presidents, Calvin Coolidge, once said that “the chief business of the American people is business.” Perhaps we should update his statement and say that the chief business of the American people has become war.

In baseball parlance, the anti-death penalty movement has batted 500 over the past 24 hours.  The Supreme Court of the United States stopped the execution of white man Cleve Foster, but the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency to back man Troy Davis.  The racial contrast speaks for itself.

Much has been written about perversion of justice in the Troy Davis case.  Post-trial findings have put the testimony and other evidence used to convict him in grave doubt.   Even Amnesty International has gotten involved in organizing support for granting clemency to Davis.

Despite this substantial new information, the prosecutors have dug in their heels and insisted that they have the right man.  We can only assume that these prosecutors are not Christian and thus have not heard of Proverbs 16:18, “Pride goeth before a fall.”  No one likes to be proven wrong, so it’s only human nature for prosecutors to stare past a raft of new evidence.

But the Board of Pardons is not implicated in the mistakes of the prosecutors.   These five people, voting in secret, decided that the law is not the hand-maiden of justice but an end unto itself.  Once the law convicts someone, we can continue to punish him or her even if we find out that the conviction was in error.

Beyond the ho-hum barbarism of seeing a man fry who is probably innocent—and I call it ho-hum because we can see it every day in war reporting from around the globe—is the idiocy of capital punishment.

There are many arguments against capital punishment, including:

• Capital punishment is not a deterrent to crime or is not as great a deterrent as putting the money spent on the capital punishment process to other uses.  
• There is a racial bias to those convicted of capital crimes and those executed, created to a large degree by unequal access to legal help and a persistent streak of racism on society, especially regarding black-on-white crime.
• The huge cost to move someone convicted of a capital crime through the system, much more than curating the convicted in prison for a lifetime.

Of course, those serious proponents of capital punishment could respond by saying that the value of societal revenge is what matters, not deterrence; and that fixes to the system can drive out racism and cut the cost of the capital process by speeding it up (killing people faster!).

But one argument trumps all the others, and that is the ethical or moral one.  I won’t call it religious, since so many religions condone the taking of another person’s life.  As a society, we are supposed to be better than our worst elements.  If we kill, we stoop to the level of the killer. 

Sparing the killer’s life makes us more human and more humane than the killer, and increases the value that our society puts on human life.

Sparing the killer is an affirmation of our social contract to live in peace.

Sparing the killer tells him or her, and the world, that when we say that human life is holy we mean it.

Nobody likes pathological monsters who commit crimes heinous enough to justify our current capital punishment.  Those who do it are the scum of the earth.  But just as we have to protect the free speech rights of Nazis, pornographers and global warming deniers, so must we protect the lives of those who have killed others.  Let them rot in jail, but let them live.  Not for their sakes, but for our own.   

Bravo to President Obama for remembering his progressive roots and the location of his spine and proposing the Buffett tax, named after billionaire financier Warren Buffett who says he and his fellow ultra-wealthy should be paying more in taxes.

The Buffett tax would raise the minimum federal income tax that people with more than $1 million in annual income have to pay.  Right now, those in the million-per-annum club pay the lowest rates in the history of the income tax.  Most economists (not in the pay of right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute and the Cato Foundation) now agree that the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy in 2001 and 2003 are what caused our federal budget surplus from the Clinton years to turn to the greatest deficit in our history. 

Poll after poll after poll of voters over the past year show that more than 60% of Americans want to raise taxes on the wealthy.  So what Obama is proposing isn’t radical, by any means.

The Republicans were not wasting away in Margaritaville with the lesser Buffett when the President dropped the news.  Such right-wing luminaries as Representative Paul Ryan and Senators Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell immediately opposed the proposed tax.

Collectively, the Republicans gave four completely bogus arguments, the same ones they always give when someone proposes to raise taxes on the wealthy or opposes one of their frequent schemes to lower taxes on the same.   Here are the reasons, with an explanation of their “bogusness” (bogusity?) in bold:

1. The tax on millionaires is a form of class warfare: They have a lot of nerve talking about class warfare after trying to bust up public unions, end unemployment benefits and destroy Social Security and Medicare.
2. It hurts corporate investment and job creation: But corporations are not creating new jobs now, but instead building up profit and paying their executives (the millionaires) hefty sums.  With the additional money collected from the millionaire tax, the federal government could do more job creation of its own, something that it happens to do well.
3. It adds to uncertainty in the economy: Huh?  There is no greater uncertainty, just a new set of certainties.  The uncertainty argument when applied to taxes or regulation is always bogus. 
4. It punishes the people who create jobs: These people have gotten off pretty well these past few decades.  They control more of our wealth and make a larger share of total income than they did 30 years ago.  They also pay far less in taxes than they did 30 years ago. President Obama doesn’t want to strip them of their wealth and the many privileges that come with it, he just wants them to pay a little bit more. 

I have a feeling that even before this entry appears that others will have thoroughly analyzed the political angle.  With one bold action, Obama hopes to get the attention of his core progressive constituency, whom he has abandoned as he tacks further and further to the right on economic, environmental and military issues.  As long as the Republicans vociferously oppose the millionaire tax, the contrast between Obama and his rightwing opponents will be very clearly drawn, much more clearly than, let’s say, after the President deep-sixed needed environmental regulations a few weeks back.

I don’t believe that President Obama is going to make a case for reelection based on this one proposal.  He will need a number of proposals that put him on the progressive side of the issue and his Republican opponents, and then opponent, clearly on the other side.